How is it that Latinx pop star Marc Anthony was deemed (by some) not "American enough" to sing "God Bless America" during a nationally-televised Major League Baseball game, yet tortilla chips and salsa are now one of the highest selling snack foods in the U.S.?

In this seminar, we will focus on Latinx identities in the context of a shared experience of colonialism, migration, and racialization. Students will survey samples of Latinx cultural production including literature, music, street art, spoken word, podcasts, television, and film clips.

What is contemporary poetry? Forget about awkward rhymes, obvious symbols, and forced interpretation. In this class we will be creating poetry through Google translate, Sharpie blackouts, challenging prompts and strange walks. We will be doing low-stakes experiments to produce high quality results. We will try and fail together, laugh together, and occasionally get muddy. But we'll also look at important poems that are seeking to create change in the world, and hopefully learn to trust our own creative and poetic instincts, no matter what our backgrounds in writing or in life.

This seminar uses comic book culture to introduce first-year students to key topics and skills in the study of the humanities. We will explore how comic books can provide valuable social and political commentaries, with a particular focus on how comics have contributed to conversations about race, gender, and the many ways in which individuals have been marginalized or ?othered? in US-American and global societies. We will ask: what are the generic conventions of comic books, particularly for superheroes, and what do those conventions tell us about the societies that produced them?

Languages mix, move, collide, and evolve, just like humans do. We encounter languages and dialects from all over the country and the world in our classrooms, dorms, and streets every single day. In Living in Babel: Language, Power, and Polyglot Life, we'll explore what languages are, how language is an active participant in social life, and how to create a classroom, university, and world that welcomes language diversity.

What does it mean to be "fit in" when you can fly, have super strength, or are born from a god? This course will explore the rise in popularity of comic books and graphic novels from Marvel movies to indie publishers and how characters are drawn and portrayed in the 2010s. Come consider how gender identities, sexuality, and traditional perceptions of masculinity and femininity shape how we read and view the world through the lens of pop culture and some of your favorite superheroes.

We explore stories, comics, essays, and films whose characters, like you, make the transition from high school seniors to college freshmen. Through a variety of group activities in class and outside (e.g. making vines in your dorm), you explore the vital role played by community during this transition: in senior spring community is intimacy: you graduate with friends you've known all your life; as college freshmen, community is opportunity: for the first time you live and make friends with people who?re not from your hometown.

What does it mean to be a part of a community? There are over 30,000 students at UMass-Amherst and you are one of them: you are one vibrant part of a campus community of thinkers, researchers, makers, inventors, activists, change-makers, organizers, designers and seekers. How do you see yourself in this landscape? What are your strengths, curiosities, agencies and passions? How do you want to contribute? Who do you want to learn from and why? What are the future worlds you want to see? Let's find some answers, together.

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How do comics shape our world? More importantly, how can you make comics that shape our world? Comics perform many essential functions in society: providing an outlet for creative self-expression, creating enduring cultural icons, and so much more. Designed to help you develop your visual storytelling skills and deepen your understanding of the comics medium, this course seeks to take you beyond simply how to make comics and get at the heart of WHY to make comics.

Are beauty and fairness enemies? If all people are created equal, why do some people make millions while others scrape by? Is it possible to treat people as equally beautiful? What functions does all our human ranking of other people serve? If so many people really value fairness, why are parts of our human-constructed world so unfair? This class is a live experiment in beauty, justice, and living. It's part art-class, part philosophical musing, and part (a big part) of engaging in social and art experimentation.